When medications are prescribed, a patient frequently does not follow the administration instructions included with the medication. A patient often forgets the specific time of day that the medication should be taken or miscalculates the interval between doses which results in the patient either taking medication too frequently, too infrequently or not at all. This can lead to a variety of pharmacological and/or toxicological problems to the patient which, ultimately, may result in ineffective treatment of a disease and/or harm to the patient.
When a drug is first administered, the desired concentration of the drug in the body is established by the prescribing physician at a level to provide the desired pharmacological effect. For example, in the case of an antibiotic, when the antibiotic is first administered, the concentration of the antibiotic in the body is established at a level deemed sufficient by the prescribing physician to kill off a proportion of the infecting organisms. Subsequent and regular doses of antibiotic provide the desired concentration that enables the immune system to overcome the infection. The organisms that remain after first administration of the antibiotic are the ones more resistant to the antibiotic than the ones killed by the first dose. If subsequent doses of antibiotic are not administered in a timely fashion, the concentration of the antibiotic in the blood declines and the organisms resume active growth. Typically, if normal growth resumes, it is those organisms more resistant to the antibiotic that are growing thereby reducing the effectiveness of the subsequent doses of the antibiotic.
Alternatively, in the case of a drug which may have a toxic effect in the body above a particular concentration, a patient who inadvertently takes such a medication too frequently may be deleteriously affected. Accordingly, it is very important that a patient is aware of when to take the prescribed medication and actually takes the medication at the recommended intervals.
Frequently, patients who may need to take several different medications during the course of a day, become confused both with the frequency and particular medication that needs to be taken at a particular time resulting in the above problems. These problems manifest themselves when the patient has impaired eyesight or is in a confused state of mind.
Whereas past systems have provided patient-programmable reminder systems, these systems do not address the needs of those patients, who, through a lack of manual dexterity, impaired eyesight or inability to follow written or oral instructions are either incapable of or unwilling to use these reminder devices. These reminder devices may also permit the patient to attempt to program a device by themselves leading to inappropriate reminders or frustration with the device due to the complexity of the programming task whereby the device is disregarded and not used. Furthermore, past devices may enable tampering by unauthorized individuals which again may lead to inappropriate reminders.
In some situations, optimum prescription times are not necessarily evenly spaced throughout the day but are sometimes related to metabolism rates. This requires that the interval between adjacent medications may not always be the same which precludes the use of simple "repeat cycle" timers that will time the same period each time it is reset. Past timers may also limit the duration of the alarm which turn themselves off within a certain period, usually in order to preserve battery power.
Accordingly, there has been a need for a programmable reminder system for medications where the prescribing pharmacist has the ability to program a simple portable module carried by the patient that ensures the correct information has been programmed and that also prohibits the patient's from gaining access to the stored program. There is also a need for an alarm timer that provides a "time-of-day" alarm which will continue until the alarm is acknowledged by the patient in order to provide specific times of an alarm and to help ensure compliance with the reminder. As well, there has been a need for a programmable reminder system where alarm times in the portable module remain set until de-programmed by the programming station in order to provide a continuous series of alarms until the module is returned to the pharmacist.
Furthermore, there has been a need for a programmable reminder system where a single programming station can program a plurality of portable modules in order to provide an efficient and cost-effective distribution of programming stations and portable modules for use by a pharmacist to serve numerous patients. There is also a need for a system where the cost of portable modules is low to ensure that the end cost of a medication to a user is not substantially increased by an overly expensive and/or complex module and base station.
As well, there has been a need for a programmable reminder system where the portable module can be quickly programmed by the pharmacist through the programming station with a communication link that minimizes the complexity and, hence, the cost of the portable module. It is also desirable to have a programmable reminder system that provides a long shelf-life for the batteries in the portable module where the module is put in a "sleep" mode by turning off the clock in the module when the module is not being used between patients.
As mentioned above, there are numerous programmable reminder systems that provide an indication that a specific period of time has elapsed thereby alerting a user that a specific task should be performed.
Canadian Patent 1,239,024 discloses a programmable service reminder apparatus and method for use with automobiles. This patent is not concerned with the problems of a programmable reminder system as outlined above. In particular, this patent does not disclose a central programming station and portable module programmed by the central station.
Canadian Patent 1,293,382 discloses an apparatus for alerting a patient to take medication which includes a plurality of medication compartments. This device does not disclose a separate programming station and alarm module and, furthermore, enables the patient to conduct the programming of the device.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,107,469 discloses a reflectance photometer instrument for controlled administration of insulin in diabetes management. This patent is concerned with the problems of providing a low power alarm clock functions in a microprocessor-based reflectance photometer instruments. This patent does not disclose a separate programming station and alarm module, where the alarm module is programmable by the programming station to provide time-of-day reminders. Rather this patent is concerned with a user initiated and activated alarm system that has been internally pre-programmed to notify a user to perform a specific task. This patent does not teach downloading alarm instructions to a portable module to provide an alarm which is acknowledged by a user.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,690,566 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,218,871 disclose a portable programmable timing device and electronic timer, respectively. These patents do not disclose a separate programming station that provides programming signals to the portable device.